FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT PEARL JAM - PAGE 4

"Love Boat Captain," among the finest songs in Pearl Jam's career, is the centerpiece of the band's new album, "Riot Act" (Epic), out Tuesday. The music evokes a voyage through a storm, while the lyrics try to make sense of the senseless: "Lost nine friends we'll never know, two year ago today," Eddie Vedder sings, "And if our lives become too long, would it add to our regret?" On June 30, 2000, Vedder and Pearl Jam were headlining the Roskilde Festival in Denmark when nine fans were trampled to death as a huge crowd surged toward the stage when Pearl Jam began to play.

It wasn't their usual audience. But when members of Pearl Jam appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives recently, they earned a few new fans. "They're darling guys," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a California Democrat. But bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard weren't there to charm anyone; they came to testify before a House panel investigating rising concert ticket prices. Pearl Jam has taken itself off tour to battle Ticketmaster, the main U.S. ticket distributor, over what the band calls outrageous service charges.

After boycotting Ticketmaster for more than a year in a dispute over service fees, Pearl Jam said Wednesday that it would allow the agency to sell tickets for part of its 1995 tour. "The band has done all it can," said band manager Kelly Curtis. "We feel the fate of ticket industry reform now lies in the hands of the Justice Department." Pearl Jam filed a complaint last year with the federal agency over what it described as excessive Ticketmaster service fees. Although marking a return to business as usual for the concert industry, the announcement served to dramatize Pearl Jam's central point in its one-band, yearlong battle against the ticket agency: It may be impossible to launch a national tour of large rock concert venues without Ticketmaster's participation.

Pearl Jam has sold its entire upcoming North American tour to SFX, the biggest coup yet for the concert behemoth. By bringing into the fold a band celebrated for its hard-line stance against the mercenary practices of the music business, insiders say, the company that had become the latest symbol of music-industry greed has scored a significant victory. SFX would seem to represent everything Pearl Jam loathes; in fact, in 1994-95, the band sought out alternative ticket agencies and cut back on touring when it contended that Ticketmaster was charging raping its fans with excessive service fees.

Is Pearl Jam ready to go it alone? The iconic rock band's recent exit from Sony Corp.'s Epic Records makes it one of the biggest rock acts to become a free agent. Now that Pearl Jam has disclosed on its Web site that it has left Epic, its record company for more than a decade, labels and other acts are watching closely to see the next move from the Seattle quintet. Insiders speculate the group, which shook up the music industry a decade ago when it took on Ticketmaster, may defy convention again by forgoing a major-label deal, instead selling its next recording independently.

Even to the naked eye, the Pearl Jam concert at the University of Montana in Missoula this weekend is shaping up to be a very big deal. It is likely to be the state's biggest musical event ever, university officials said. About 22,000 fans are expected as the band kicks off its 1998 North American tour. Workers have begun building the concert stage at Washington-Grizzly Stadium and more than 150 university students have been hired to help with Saturday night's show. "Getting this all together has been a monumental task," said John McCall, director of UM Productions, "but everything has been going really well so far."

The heat and energy rising from the crowd of pumped-up Pearl Jam fans at Soldier Field on Tuesday night were a far cry from the cool mellow that enveloped the Grateful Dead's shows just days earlier. But like the Dead's concerts, Pearl Jam's show brought a trouble-plagued tour to a relatively uneventful end. Pearl Jam, one of the world's most popular rock bands, arrived in town to close out a tour that has been plagued with problems-many of the shows were canceled-spinning off of its battle with Ticketmaster.

Does Pearl Jam matter anymore? That's a question every band faces once its record sales head south after a run of multiplatinum successes. In the early '90s, the Seattle quintet was the biggest band in the world. But as Pearl Jam shied from the superstar status foisted upon them, its audience scattered, still leaving enough fans to fill the Allstate Arena Monday. This is not a band wheezing on its last legs. On the contrary, Pearl Jam has never played with more power, subtlety and confidence.

With their self-titled eighth album, "Pearl Jam" (J Records), and first in four years, the alternative-rock veterans put some snap back in their step, some nastiness back in their guitars. Eddie Vedder is growling, howling and mumbling about trying to keep his chin up amid an epidemic of "World Wide Suicide"; the war in Iraq hangs over several of these songs like a dark cloak. But the political specifics are kept to a minimum and the sentiments are disappointingly bland ("It's a shame to awake in a world of pain")

`Banging your head against the wall, it will take a toll," Eddie Vedder is saying, with the rueful chuckle of a man who once had the reputation of wearing a bruise the size of Puget Sound on his furrowed brow. "But when you wake up from that, or get through that, things start falling into place." The Pearl Jam singer, famous for pushing the rock up Sisyphus Mountain in the early '90s, when the Seattle quintet seemed to be perpetually at war with the record industry, the media, even itself, is no longer the center of the rock world, and happier for it. If Pearl Jam's first three albums ("Ten," "Vs.," "Vitalogy")